Dinosaur

May 26, 2000

Dinosaur is a stunning visual movie. The real-life vistas that the computer-generated dinos inhabit are breathtakingly beautiful. The panoramas themselves hold your interest, then zoom into herds of dinosaurs. Jurassic Park's popup glimpses of dinos in a modern foliage setting didn't prepare us for this up-close, intimate portrait. Realistic dinosaurs portrayed in vegetatively correct settings on The Discovery Channel's Walking With Dinosaurs was fascinating, but Disney's dinos are offering something else. They tell a story.

The question of whether the dinosaurs should be talking is a hard one. Disney seemingly can't resist anthropomorphizing everything from mice to candlesticks. Because the movie has to be a gigantic success to justify the $200 million price tag, the dinosaurs must be made into a Disney adventure that is marketed through McDonald's.

The sheer numbers of dinosaurs depicted in this film is overwhelming. Did they really wander in such large groups of mixed types? Once the dinosaurs start to talk, you begin to question the scientific validity of the scenes you are presented, even if they are based on research.

The resulting movie has a lot of appeal. The story has two main prongs. Aladar the Iguanodon (voiced by D.B. Sweeny) arrives on an island solely inhabited by mammals as a very-near-to-hatching egg and is raised and sheltered in the mammalian style by his adoptive lemur family. Then disaster strikes, and the surviving island group is forced to go to the dinosaur-dominated mainland. The two segments work together well. The island setting provides us with the opportunity to get to know Aladar. Within the large herd of dinosaurs, it wouldn't have been easy to distinguish him. As it turns out, he is easy to spot, having a family of lemurs riding piggyback.

Disney's last steps out of the tried and true fairy tale formula were The Lion King and Toy Story I & II. The themes and panorama approach of The Lion King are visibly present in Dinosaur. The backgrounds of actual places, some shot here in Florida, made Dinosaur come to life. It was the reality of it all that made you accept that this all took place in the final era of the dinosaurs. All of the money and the effort, 12 years in the making, paid off.

The story progresses with some interesting characters. Aladar, our Iguanodon hero, is a sincere, likable youth. The leader of the dinosaur herd is a gruff realist, Kron (voiced by Samuel E. Wright). Julianna Margulies, now absent from ER, turns up as the voice of Neera, Kron's sister. She provides the strong woman role model that Disney now conscientiously provides in each new kids' movie.

The villains are Carnotaurs. This casting was a nice change from the typical Tyrannosaurus Rex. They're not given the magical ability to speak - they're too busy wreaking havoc. Disney also uses Carnotaurs as the villains in its dinosaur-themed ride at Animal Kingdom. Carnotaurs have the atypical look of toadish heads with horrific teeth. One glimpse and the flight response kicks in. How could Mother Earth spawn such creatures? There is something to be said for extinction. Even other dinosaurs seemed doomed next to the Carnotaurs, and some of them looked pretty tough.

The lemurs, which represent the primates in the movie, seem slightly stilted and two-dimensional. This is a shame when Disney went through the trouble of individually animating 1.1 million hairs per lemur. Maybe they tried too hard. Zini (Max Casella), the comic-relief so-called love monkey, perpetually suffers from a bad hair day. Aladar learns a warm-blooded world-view from his adoptive family. When they join the dinosaur herd, he attempts to implement these lessons and have the slave-driverlike leaders give up their cold-blooded ways.

The story line was pretty hard on the Iguanadons that couldn't adapt. There is death and carnage in Dinosaur. Some of the scenes are intense. Some are swiftly menacing and startling; some are slow, calculating and deadly, as in leaving the weak to die. However fascinated a 4- or 5-year-old might be with dinosaurs, this movie probably is too intense for even the average 7- or 8-year-old.

Dinosaur is a must-see for its state-of-the-art, computer-generated medium. Disney really put its dollars and technical knowledge on the line, and this movie should provide a big payoff. Now that Disney has the ability to convincingly animate dinosaurs and animals imposed upon real-life backgrounds, the question becomes: Will they stop at the cartoon and animal world, or will this new technology spread to humanoid actors, as well?

In Dinosaur, Disney strives to please everyone: the dinosaur purists, the gradeschoolers and almost everyone in between. Disney has done a great job of this, especially when it took so long to get off the ground and so much was on the line.

Well, that's it for the 1999-2000 group of reviewers. I, along with my fellow critics, have enjoyed the time we spent working on Rave. As the last critic of the group to have a review published, I would like to wish the new critics the best of luck. Also, I'd like to thank everyone who read my reviews - whether you liked them or hated them. I hope they gave you something to talk about!